Variant subtag proposal: ALA-LC romanization of Russian

[Michael Everson]

On 18 Nov 2009, at 13:37, Doug Ewell wrote:

>> I would happily accept alalc97 as a generic subtag that caters for all 
>> of the romanization tables in the 1997 edition of the ALA-LC 
>> Romaniztion Tables. It is a single reference, well-defined.
> 
> That's fine with me, but there are some on this list who believe, fairly 
> strongly, that we should register only those subtags explicitly 
> requested (by others, not on our own), and that we should not register 
> variant subtags that apply to different languages such that the exact 
> meaning of the subtag differs depending on the language.

In this case we have a particular authoritative specification which specifies transliterations for a number of languages (including Russian). Moreover, that specification is in very, very widespread use already. 

So we could register alalc97, specifiying all the tags that can be used with it (omitting Japanese, perhaps with a note pointing to what should be used for that) and we're done.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/